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Monday, September 06, 2004

BESLAN

Stan at Logic & Sanity has a new url for the aftermath and investigation, "if you want to follow developments as they are reported first from the russian sources."

Here is a smattering of his excellent and deeply-appreciated blogging/translations . . .

utro.ru

270 bodies have been identified.

Over 700+ received medical help.

The official total for the number of hostages is 1,191.

Officials say that many of the wounded were shot in the back as they tried to escape during the rescue operation.

gzt.ru

- According to hostages, on the last day of the siege the terrorists did not allow anyone to use the bathroom.

- Some children ate plants that were in the building, because they were so hungry.

- Some children drank their urine, because of thirst.

- According to one of the hostages terrorists raped some older students.

- One hostage is saying that one of the terrorists was "nice", he sat quietly reading Koran and had a beard. "When I asked him if we'll be freed, he said: I don't know guys, I am not in the know".

- Terrorists had a cellphone and would regularly report to someone on the outside.

- Terrorists told children that the tap water was poisoned.

- When the hostages tried to escape as the storming took place they were shot in the back, one of the hostages claims that one of the terrorists who was shooting was smiling as the children were falling.

gzt.ru

As I posted before:

323 dead, 156 of those are children.

But it gets even worse. 260 are missing.

pravda.ru

According to the residents of Beslan, the real number of dead could be around 600.

I believe this is the biggest body count from a single terror act, after 9/11.

gazeta.ru

North Osetia's minister of interior, Kazbek Dzantiev, has resigned.

izvestia.ru

Russian intelligence has information that points to Abu Omar Asef as the chief financier of the terrorist act in Beslan. Abu Omar Asef is a wahabbi and Al Qaeda's representative in Chechnya.

strana.ru

According to German intelligence (as reported in strana.ru), the Arabs who took part in the hostage taking, were Syrian and Jordanian citizens who trained in Afghanistan.

gzt.ru

U.S. government has donated $50,000 to the Russian Red Cross.

utro.ru

According to the hostages, the explosives were scotch taped to the basketball hoops inside the gym.They were remote controlled, but ended up going off accidentaly. The scotch tape couldn't hold one of them and it fell, going off in the process, its shock wave knocking down one of the terrorists and setting off another bomb. There was a great deal of casualties from that alone, and ultimately that accident is what caused the raid.

According to utro.ru's repoter, there are about 500 bodies in the morgue. The official number of dead is still at 323.

Unfortunately, I think we are going to see the final death toll somewhere around 600.

UK Times Online (via LGF)

AFTER more than 24 hours in the sweltering heat of the school gymnasium in Beslan, one of the boys trapped inside could not take it any longer. Summoning up his courage, he approached a hostage taker with a bayonet fixed to his assault rifle and asked him for a drink. It was probably the worst error that he could have made.

“Instead of giving him water, he drove his bayonet through the boy’s body,” said Stanislav Tsarakhov, 10, another captive standing nearby. “I don’t know if he died.”

The only terrorist of the group who was caught alive.

According to lenta.ru, the man shown on Channel 1 (Kulov) was of a dark complexion, unshaved and about 30 years of age. He spoke russian with a heavy accent, and during the questioning repeated several times "I swear, I want to live. I swear to Allah, that I did not kill a single woman or a child."

Relatives and neighbors of killed hostages attend the funeral ceremony in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya, September 6, 2004. Flags flew at half-mast across Russia on Monday at the start of national mourning for 338 people killed when Chechen rebels seized a school, while questions mounted over President Vladimir Putin's policies. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

Relatives mourn for Madina Sozanova, 11, a hostage killed in Russia's school siege, after her funeral in the town of Beslan, September 6, 2004. Grief-stricken mothers and fathers trudged through mud and rain on Monday to bury children killed in a Russian school siege as criticism mounted over the way the Kremlin handled the crisis. At least 335 people, half of them children, were killed during a bloodbath that ended last week's 53-hour siege of the school by Chechen separatists. REUTERS/Viktor Korotayev

Two girls hug while they stand at the destroyed
school gym in Beslan, North Ossetia. (AFP/Yuri Tutov)